A new screening system developed and tested at UF will give the green light for cleanliness.
HyGreen, a sensor that works much like a breathalyzer, uses residual scent to determine whether a doctor's or nurse's hands are clean.
"The most important thing you can get people to do is wash their hands just before you touch a patient and just after," said Dr. Nikolaus Gravenstein, an anesthesiologist who helped develop HyGreen. "And what you realize is that's a heroic number of hand washes."
The HyGreen system monitors workers, flashing green if workers' hands are clean and vibrating like a restaurant buzzer if their hands need washing, Gravenstein said. Each employee will wear an electronic HyGreen badge that flashes green when activated by sensors placed in a patient's room, keeping constant record of a hospital worker's hand-washing habits.
"It will naturally motivate them," Gravenstein said. "We all perform better if people are keeping score."
The product, which took eight months to develop and is currently in its first round of clinical testing at the intensive care unit at Shands at UF, is the newest way hospitals can fight to keep costs down, said Dr. Richard Melker, who worked with Gravenstein to develop the product.
Because of new mandates that prohibit Medicare and Medicaid from footing the bill for mishaps called "never events," which include blunders such as operating on the wrong patient, the financial burden will fall on the hospital. "The majority are related to hospital-acquired infections," Melker said, noting that private insurance companies will most likely follow suit.
Melker said he thinks hospitals will initially implement the HyGreen system in high-risk areas such as the ICU or transplant facilities where patients' immune systems are compromised. However, once hospitals see how effective the HyGreen system is, they will likely require it, he said. Patients will also be able to determine the cleanliness of the staff, by monitors above their beds that will display a reading, Gravenstein said.
"It's hard in a doctor-patient relationship to be asking the doctors if they're really washing their hands," he said. "[With] this system, they'll know automatically: clean is green."
